Does “The Knowing” Alter “The Known”?: On the Troublesome Relation of Facts and Ideas in a Deweyan Epistemology

18 Does "The Knowing" Alter "The Known"? On the Troublesome Relation of Facts and Ideas in a Deweyan Epistemology. Chris McCarthy University of Iowa I. Introduction In the process that has come to be called the "construction of knowledge," what is it, exactly, that gets made? How much control over the product do the "constructors" actually have? And to what extent is that which is "known," i.e., the product of the inquiry, dependent upon that which is outside the control of the knowledge seekers? One might take it that the pragmatic view on these matters could be readily summed up, in the following, simplified, theses: 1. Knowledge is made, not discovered. 2. Knowledge, a product of contingent human efforts in unique concrete situations, is neither general nor secure, nor can anything be known with certainty. 3. There is no 'antecedent reality' that exists prior to being known, which determines what can come to be known. These theses seem to be widely taken as part and parcel of a classical pragmatic interpretation of epistemology and ontology, to be views that Dewey would have endorsed. This, I would take it, would be a "popular" account of a pragmatic view of "knowing and the known." I have argued at length elsewhere1 that each one of these statements is wrong, that, taken together, they constitute a caricature of a Deweyan epistemology, and that a philosophical pragmatist has strong reasons, generated within the pragmatic tradition, for rejecting each and every one of these claims. The argument is that pragmatic inquiry, of the sort explicated most thoroughly by Dewey, requires a grounding in an ontological realism of the sort most thoroughly explicated by Peirce. Without such grounding, passages in Dewey can be taken as indicating a view very much like a modern Idealism, i.e., there is no antecedent reality to be known—an interpretation which Dewey emphatically disavowed. The associated claim is that Dewey did indeed set out the required ontolgical thesis, contrary to currently popular accounts. In short, neither Dewey nor Peirce would have endorsed the above theses, and that the view represented in this version of "pragmatism" is implausible and should be revised. For there is a missing element, that when set in place changes the picture considerably. And that missing element, to paraphrase Peirce, is Reality. The claim I've made is that there is an often overlooked ontological realism2 that is properly associated with the Deweyan pragmatic inquiry, the implication of which is that "what" might be discovered in inquiry, what might be known, is in an important sense set in advance, and is independent of the beliefs, hopes and preferences of the inquirer(s). The "production of knowledge," in virtue of this external limiting determination, is indeed the production of that which is stable, secure, general, and, in one very important sense, "transcendent" of the concrete particulars of its originating conditions. This is a rather controversial thesis. In explicating it further here, I shall examine several crucial issues, developing what I take to be the best "Deweyan" interpretations, and set these in contrast to the contrary positions on a "Deweyan realism" advanced recently by Cunningham and by Garrison. II. On the Alteration of the Known, by the very act of Knowing Does act of knowing alter what is known, and if so, how? Cunningham sets out clearly the view that is here contested. He writes "...by engaging with brute events in the process of inquiry, inquirers alter reality by conferring upon events attributes which were not previously there. Reality is not 'mind-independent'; rather, mind and reality are intricately interwoven...."3 There are several senses in which such a claim is quite simply true, and eminently in keeping with Deweyan pragmatism. For one, it is quite true, albeit in a trivial sense, that the process of knowing "changes" the unknown fact into the fact-known. The "unknown fact" here should be understood as a true contrary-to-fact conditional, i.e., If it were the case that operation x were to be undertaken in the situation, an alteration a in the situation would occur. This unknown fact comes to be known when (and only when) the operation is in...